On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > William Stein wrote: > >> The Cygwin-based port will provide all functionality, not a limited >> subset. As an estimate of difficulty: I'm confident Mike Hansen and I >> working fulltime for one month could complete it. It would have been >> finished already if good people were working on it. Just to back up >> that claim, consider: > > But that is very different from a native Windows port, which was I thought we > were talking about.
We are talking about porting Sage to windows. I will leave it to the lawyers to define "native Windows port". Most users could care less. They know it when they use it. I bet 99.9% of Windows users couldn't tell the difference between installing and running a Sage install built with GCC that links in Cygwin1.dll and one built with MSVC. I bet 100% of users can tell the difference between installing and running Sage built into a VirtualBox machine versus one built using Cygwin or MSVC. > A Cygwin port is a much simpler task. I'm not saying its an easy task, but > it's > a hell of a lot easier than a native Windows application, like Word, > Powerpoint, > Mathematica, MATLAB or Maple. I thought that was what you meant by a "native" > application. That was why I thought it was going to take many man years. > > Cygwin seems a vastly inferior environment to VirtualBox. > It certainly would not > be my choice if I wanted to run Sage under Windows. But perhaps it offers some > advantages over VirtualBox, like its more closely linked to Windows. I strongly disagree with your assertion that Cygwin would be vastly inferior to VirtualBox for Windows users. How much have you used VirtualBox or Cygwin? I've used both for hundreds of hours, and I've also listened to and watched tons of Windows users. Sage built using Cygwin would be vastly better for most Windows users than VirtualBox. -- William -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
